AI Developers’ Trail of Book Destruction — There is no “loophole” in copyright that permits scanning books if you destroy the original. There is a single federal district court decision that did not acknowledge the body of case law that says otherwise, including binding precedent from its own Circuit Court. Keith Kupferschmid of the Copyright Alliance takes a closer look at the stories around AI developers scanning and destroying physical books for training materials.
The Underappreciated Third U.S. Fair Use Factor in Copyright Infringement Cases Concerning AI Training — Law professor Marketa Trimble discusses the third fair use factor, which directs courts to consider “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole” when analyzing whether a particular use is a fair use, and observes that in most cases, while AI companies use a vast number of works to train models, no particular work is required for an AI model. This raises an issue under fair use since it indicates a lack of the type of justification to use a particular work that is needed for fair use.
Google Earth Pulls AI Image Generator After Users Created Misleading Images — There are several explanations for why seemingly every week one of the major tech companies introduces a new AI feature that no one asked for and is clearly harmful (example). One is that they are beta testing and need to collect large amounts of real world user data.
AI-assisted music now eligible for copyright registration in South Korea — The Korea Music Copyright Association reversed its earlier policy that made such works ineligible for registration. Songs generated purely from text prompts without any additional human involvement will remain ineligible under the new policy.
China’s MiniMax curbs overseas access to new AI video model over copyright disputes — The developer has limited access to users in the US, EU, UK and South Korea following ongoing copyright litigation, including a federal lawsuit in the US brought by several film studios.